Stag hunt and chicken games are canonical representations of two kinds of strategic interactions. In stag hunt, aggression feeds on itself, and mutual fear escalates into conflict. Chicken is a model of preemption and deterrence. With complete information, these games have multiple Nash...

Earlier studies found little evidence of scale economies at large banks; later studies using data from the 1990s uncovered such evidence, providing a rationale for very large banks seen worldwide. Using more recent data, we estimate scale economies using two production models. The standard...

This paper investigates a general relationship between risk and time preferences. I consider a decision maker who chooses between consumption of a particular prize in one period and a different prize in another period. The individual believes that today's good is certain, and that, as the...

Maximum likelihood estimation of discretely observed diffusion processes is mostly hampered by the lack of a closed form solution of the transient density. It has recently been argued that a most generic remedy to this problem is the numerical solution of the pertinent Fokker-Planck (FP) or...

Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) have developed two measures of pricing errors for asset pricing models: the maximum pricing error in all static portfolios of the test assets and the maximum pricing error in all contingent claims of the assets. In this paper, we develop simulation-based Bayesian...

We extend a standard New Keynesian model both to incorporate heterogeneity in spending opportunities along with two sources of (potentially time-varying) credit spreads and to allow a role for the central bank's balance sheet in determining equilibrium. We use the model to investigate the...

The dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models used to study business cycles typically assume that exogenous disturbances are independent first-order autoregressions. This paper relaxes this tight and arbitrary restriction by allowing for disturbances that have a rich contemporaneous...

Banks face two different kinds of moral hazard problems: asset substitution by shareholders (e.g., making risky, negative net present value loans) and managerial rent seeking (e.g., investing in inefficient 'pet' projects and consuming perquisites that yield private benefits). The privately...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund's alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

The real effects of an imperfectly credible disinflation depend critically on the extent of price rigidity. In this paper, we examine how credibility affects the outcome of a disinflation in a model with endogenous time-dependent pricing rules. Both the endogenous initial degree of price...